In my role as founding editor of the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, I get asked a lot about trends. What's hot now? What's the next big thing? How do you see the future of theory? And so on. One of the things I say in response to such questions is that ‘the question of the animal’ – even as it certainly remains a growth industry in a number of disciplines in the humanities and interpretive social sciences – seems to have been left behind, all too predictably, by the economy of planned obsolescence in academic knowledge production and theory. As Niklas Luhmann pointed out long ago, the autopoiesis of the disciplines within the education system, as with other social systems, depends upon the ceaseless production of novelty (Luhmann 2000: 21, 28). Part of that production of novelty has been a widespread decentring of the human across a range of disciplines and theoretical approaches over the past three decades or more. But as I argued in What Is Posthumanism?, when it comes to the decentring of the human, the issue isn't just what you’re thinking, it's how you’re thinking it. And here, one might draw a bright line between so-called Flat Ontologies and my insistence later in this chapter on what one might call instead ‘jagged ontologies’, ones that pay attention to differences and to how, as Gregory Bateson puts it, those differences make a difference: in this case, to formulating the discourse of the Anthropocene (Bateson 1972: 453).

In this context, I’ll later engage Bruno Latour's Facing Gaia, with its admirable desire to assert what he calls the ‘outlaw character’ of Gaia as a stay against both holism and humanism and their understanding of Gaia as a kind of mythical super-organism.

When we think of Wallace Stevens and the question of ecological poetics, we probably are drawn to think of what he called his poetic “mundo”: a poetic universe structured by the turning of the seasons, which themselves correspond to distinct philosophical and phenomenological stances. The world of summer, for example, is a world of fecund imagination creating the world anew, while the world of winter is a world of “decreation” and contraction, a return to “things as they are.” We can get a radically different view of Stevens as an ecological poet, however, if we deploy a concept of environment that is more scientifically contemporary, one that foregrounds the dynamic co-implication and co-production of organism and environment in all its contingency, as highlighted in the contemporary biology of perception and cognition as we find it in figures such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In this light, the ecological dimension of Stevens’s poetry may be located in the fact that his poetics enacts the same “operating program,” with all its attendant paradoxes, of autopoietic living systems, rather than engaging in a representational relationship to what we used to call “nature.”

What does rethinking the concept of the political from a posthumanist point of view entail? More specifically, I want to ask here, what resources are made available to us for this task in Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France published in translation under the title, The Birth of Biopolitics? My approach to these questions may be usefully contrasted with Wendy Brown's account of the waning of the political sphere in her recent book, Undoing the Demos, where she laments the weakening of the political as such under the pressure of neoliberalism. More specifically, she identifies the incursion of the neoliberal logic of the market into what was heretofore the autonomous, or at least largely autonomous, realm of the political, where popular sovereignty should be allowed to express itself and be articulated by a set of values not subject to neoliberalism's logic of the market. Taking off from a critical reading of The Birth of Biopolitics, she argues that ‘neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning and operation of democracy's constituent elements into economic ones’ (Brown 2015: 17). For neoliberal reason, as she characterises it,

As she notes, critics of neoliberalism typically focus on four main negative effects of this shift: intensified inequality between polarised haves and have nots, with a stagnant (or worse) middle class caught in between; the commercialisation of activities that ought not be subject to the logic or dis-course of commercialisation (education, wilderness, green space and carbon emissions, but also organ trafficking); increasingly inappropriate intimacy between finance capital, corporations and the state; and, finally, an increasingly unstable economic landscape brought on by the volatility of the financial markets themselves (epitomised by the 2008–9 ‘bubble’ and meltdown),

What kind of event is extinction? To answer that question, we have to begin with an assertion that will seem paradoxical to some and commonsensical to others: that extinction is both the most natural thing in the world and, at the same time, is never and never could be natural. On the one hand, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed in the history of this planet are extinct; on the other hand, extinction can hardly be regarded as “natural” in any simple sense, and not just because, as a number of people have argued, “nature,” conceived as some realm apart, untouched and unshaped by human affairs, ceased to exist a long time ago, as all the recent talk about climate change and the Anthropocene makes clear. Beyond this, the psychoanalytically inclined among us point out that any human registration of the so-called “fact” of nature is always already radically denaturalized because the symbolic and imaginary realms that make the presence of nature manifest to us in their different ways are anything but “natural.” As Slavoj Žižek put it, now twenty-five years ago, “the fact that man is a speaking being means precisely that he is, so to speak, constitutively ‘derailed,”” an “open wound of the world,” as Hegel put it, that “excludes man forever from the circular movement of life,” so that “all attempts to regain a new balance between man and nature” can only be a form of fetishistic disavowal.

One way to complicate this assertion is to realize that everything Žižek says does not apply only to human beings (because we are not the only “speaking beings” in the full sense intended here) even as we cannot say in any neat and simplistic way which nonhuman forms of life fall under the purview of this assertion and which do not – a desire for neat and tidy distinctions between different forms of life, different ways of being in the world, that would constitute its own form of fetishistic disavowal, as Jacques Derrida (among others) has pointed out.

What clinches the Pound/Emerson connection is not only that both writers worked squarely within the ideology of individualism – Emerson its premier exponent in American literary history, Pound its not-soobvious modernist inheritor – but mainly that the ideology they shared generated in both largely the same conclusions about those social institutions and cultural conventions that bore down upon the active center of their politics. Pound's storied career as magazine editor, advisor, and all-around promoter and guru testifies to the fact that, for him, the problem of ideology was a good deal more complex than simply endorsing or rejecting a given “world view.” Indeed, the target of Pound's critique of literary production is not so much “false consciousness” as it is enforced consciousness shaped and reproduced by material institutions and practices. In this respect, Pound's modernism can be sharply distinguished from Emerson's romantic side, the Emerson for whom it would be overly simple, but not wrong, to say that something very much like false consciousness prevents the liberation of the self-reliant individual.

But there was another Emerson, of course, and that one sounded very much like Pound the shrewd modernist when he zeroed in on the relationship between economic production and ideological reproduction. That Emerson was dismayed to find that the increasing division of labor and the insidious logic of specialization in capitalist production had found their way into cultural and scholarly practice as well.

If what we now call postmodernism is any indication, we have yet to come to terms with the risks, matched only by the atavistic hankering, involved in asking the question, what does it mean to be American? Even the form of the question itself seems somehow quintessentially American: a sign, perhaps, of its essentialist allure and ahistorical dangers, and not only for Americans. As Régis Debray's famous quip about the post-1968 Left in France testifies – they set sail for Maoist China and landed in California – and as Jean Baudrillard's recent forays into the Epcot Center of the American Mind indicate, it seems as if the whole world (or at least that part of it which can afford to) is asking itself that same question. In fact, FredricJameson has argued that recent Continental theories of the postmodern self are “secretly North American in their content, if not their form.” And Jameson's suspicion is seconded by Stuart Hall, who reminds us that postmodernism is really about “how the world dreams itself to be American.”

America, in other words, seems to be an idea whose time has come. What is curious, however, is that this appears to have always been the case. For nearly two centuries, European thinkers have seen in America (for better or for worse, depending on their ideological positions) the “end of history” and the egalitarian, antiauthoritarian, and democratic society identified (with a similar range of ideological response) by presentday theorists of the postmodern.

When I first began work on this study, I was fortunate enough to have at my disposal two superb research libraries, one at Duke and one at Chapel Hill. But neither collection, I soon discovered, included a hard copy of Ezra Pound's Jefferson and/or Mussolini – an eclectic and disturbing text that was central to Pound, crucial to my understanding of him, but little known outside Poundian circles and often marginalized within them. Eventually, as dumb luck would have it, I stumbled upon a copy in the political science section of a local used-book store whose main holdings, it seemed, were in gardening and science fiction. It would be easy, of course, to overread the politics of this curious little episode, but let me suggest that the eventual conclusions we might reach about its significance would likely reproduce one of the two dominant modes of Pound criticism in the past forty years: the conspiracy theory, which imagines that the traditional Pound industry has engaged in a more or less conscious suppression of the embarrassingly political Pound (who is distilled in texts tike Jefferson and/or Mussolini), the better to defend the supposedly autonomous work of the poet; and the autonomy-of-art theory of those who would so conspire.

My characterization of the situation is obviously schematic, but it serves to illustrate my larger point: that critics who would engage Pound's work find themselves framed from the outset by a kind of critical cold war, one that forces them into something resembling the role of Marc Antony at the funeral in Julius Caesar.

Late in his career, Emerson used this little story to size up what he called “the ambition of individualism,” a subject he could claim, mutatis mutandis, to know a little something about. But so could Ezra Pound, of course, who in the Cantos seems to take the possibility of clapping copyright on the world more seriously than even Emerson himself could have imagined. And Emerson's image of the bitten world holding the biter fast by the teeth is, in an almost uncanny way, an accurate image for the death struggle in which Pound found himself at the Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa, when the bitten world of history – not Pound's ideal history of a fascist “city of Dioce” built upon the timeless principles of a Confucian order, but the real history of the Second World War and the lunar rubble of liberal democracy's triumph over fascism – would not let Pound disengage himself from the ideological commitments he had latched onto in his poetry, prose, and radio speeches.

Emerson's little parable, however, is not, finally, about the price one pays for one's ideological positions; it is not even an admonition about the dangers of politicizing one's cultural practice.

By virtue of his manly rhetoric of virtù, Pound compels us to situate his critique of American culture within an economy of gender as well. As an antidote to the evils of abstraction, conformity, and what a later critical vocabulary would call reification, Pound seems to offer us an exclusively male world of experience, of rough-and-tumble, bone and sinew, which constantly threatens to evaporate into the clichés of macho, rugged individualism. As we shall see, however, Pound's critique is a good deal more complex than that. When he set the virtù of the “entire man” over against what he called the “gynocracy” of genteel writers and editors like Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder, and Robert Underwood Johnson, he engaged himself not so much in some misogynist battle of the sexes as in yet another effort in a long line of American endeavors by male writers to move literature from the drawingroom margins it occupied at the turn of the century into the public sphere, where it might be taken seriously as a liberating force for social critique and change.

The rhetoric of gender and feminization in Pound's cultural critique is particularly complex to assess for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that in Pound's work the figure of gender – like that of economics – can never be read in isolation or taken, as it were, at face value. It is almost always, and overtly so, articulated in tandem with the other major concerns of class, economics, and cultural production in Pound's ambitious and totalizing critique.

The young Ezra Pound may have seen his Emersonian respect for “the peripheries of the individual” culturally codified in Henry James – may have seen in James, that is, what James himself traced to Emerson. But Henry James was not the only go-between who enabled the literary ideology of Emerson to flourish (unbeknownst to the inheritor) in our modernist, who could not recognize his precursor's cultural politics, so much his own, through the persistent mist of transcendentalism. This other agent of ideological transmission, Ernest Fenollosa (like Emerson, a native son of Boston and its environs), would have surely fancied himself as much the opposite of his contemporary Henry James as Pound thought himself (when he thought about it at all) the antithesis of Emerson. But those differences only underscore how powerful, seductive, and flexible this ideological structure is. It can accommodate the discursions of James – “weaving an endless sentence” as Pound remembered him in Canto VII – and the Chinese compression of Fenollosa alongside the modernism of Pound and the romanticism of Emerson. For reasons of temperament and training, Pound would not have taken his ideogrammic poetics from Emerson himself. But take it he did, not from the source but from the sinologist who taught Emerson in Japan when he began to explore the world of the ideogram.

Throughout 1913, five years after her husband's death, Mary Fenollosa – herself a novelist of some note (a.k.a. “Sidney McCall”) and an anthologized poet as well – kept watch for someone who might edit her late husband's notes on Chinese poetry and Noh drama.